Uncensored Gore
The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn
lot of us for letting despots rule.
by Marc Cooper,
(Photo by Debra DiPaolo),

It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in an earlier time and
somehow stumbled into America's Constitutional Convention. A man with his views,
so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled
from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So
muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore
Vidal.

When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty
chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of
the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about
the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed
repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the
Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties
mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After
splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades,
Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77
years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss
earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and
more productive than ever.

Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he
wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington,
Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even
with all of their human foibles on display — vanity, ambition, hubriis, envy
and insecurity — their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to buuilding the
first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.
The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few
pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now
dominates the capital named for our first president.

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our
revolutionary past and our imperial present.

MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it
seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out
to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.

GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other
three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles — slaveholders and planttation owners.
Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the
upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have
invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one
of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was
full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry
to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in
the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am
in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good
government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a
space of years, such government.

But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the
past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger
at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said,
we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism ,- the
only form of government suitable for such a people.

MARC COOPER But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued that the
Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

GORE VIDAL: Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another
Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working. Like taking a car in to
get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy's
jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the
first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to
change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in
the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn't care.

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the
only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a
chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to
Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is
only going to last a year.

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably
still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to
start changing this damn thing.

MARC COOPER: Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the
Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America's two
parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads
of continuity in our current body politic?

GORE VIDAL: Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted.
Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises
the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is
corruption on a major scale.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting
brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the
government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start
some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is punished for
squandering the people's money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.
So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one
wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have a
business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business,
then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule
that the Bush people have given us.

The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as
anything Hitler came up with — even using much of the same language.. In one of my
earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used
by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like
Timothy McVeigh — how their rights were going to be suspended only ffor a brief
time — was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstagg fire.

MARC COOPER: In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves
comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson
wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who
had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

GORE VIDAL: Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer
democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the
other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he
believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born
in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social
station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he
who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people,
meaning the rich.

So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't think of
any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was
highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already
they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and
such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like
Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union
of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that
overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.

MARC COOPER: But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in
your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to LBJ's
debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the
tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking
about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish
Republican administration?

GORE VIDAL: No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT
Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor
approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American
citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you
need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You
can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military
tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled,
stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as
a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All oof this is
in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be
despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this
through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

MARC COOPER: So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of
the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

GORE VIDAL: No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would
have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all.
They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the
military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much
more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans woould not think
of them as citizens.

MARC COOPER: Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

GORE VIDAL: I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything,
and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We
have no due process.

MARC COOPER: Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the
weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over
how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is
headed for the same fate?

GORE VIDAL: I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing
the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things
that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting
this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy,
dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more
than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and
never will know, and they don't care.

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there
isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing
has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we ,- are
generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare
mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the
ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador
East in Chicago — which of course is ridiculous.

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long!
People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that,
but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.

MARC COOPER:["Read and Weep" to quote you.] Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

GORE VIDAL: No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic.
That would be dangerous. We don't want an election without a paper trail. The
makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because
they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job to count votes? Or
do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the
machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these
machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?
So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting
machines. He can't lose.

MARC COOPER: But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts
of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies
eventually fall apart?

GORE VIDAL: Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought
that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America would have come as far as we
are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are
nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for
our taxes. I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years,
which I lived through. But it did last.

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them
counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office.
He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up.
People can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total mess. How does he make such
a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not.
They want to stay in power.

MARC COOPER: You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the
American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn't
there still a democratic underpinning?

GORE VIDAL: No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old
people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a
government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we
have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare
of the rich.

MARC COOPER: Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

GORE VIDAL: Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents
have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of
Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries
in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

MARC COOPER: How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

GORE VIDAL: :I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever
more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later
they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us.